Coupon clipping is a great way to save money on groceries and other purchases. If you combine the Sunday paper with the coupons you can find online, you can wind up saving thousands of dollars. But to really hunt down all those great deals, you have to commit a lot of time to the process. Rather than spending your time hunting through the newspaper looking for coupons, you can outsource your coupon clipping.

Purchasing Already-Clipped Coupons

If you search eBay for coupons, you’ll get almost 25,000 results. A few of those are coupon holders, but most are coupons that someone has clipped and posted for sale, along with gift certificates and vouchers. Some are even worth hundreds of dollars. On average, most of the coupons on eBay are sold for a fraction of their value. While you won’t get the full savings you might get if you spent the time to find coupons on your own, you’ll still get a significant savings. As long as you have an eBay account, you can further automate picking up already-clipped coupons by saving searches for coupons for the products you use most often. A couple of clicks and you’ll always know when a new coupon is available.

Beyond eBay, there are many websites that sell coupons. The Coupon Clippers, for instance, sells coupons for between 8 and 20 cents, depending on the value of the coupon. Many websites only handle coupons for a particular area — a state or certain cities — in order to effectively provide coupons for local restaurants or businesses. Finding those sites is a matter of searching.

Requesting Specific Coupons

Even if you can’t purchase an already-clipped coupon, there are ways other ways to arrange for someone else to do the hard part. Just as you can outsource most tasks to a virtual assistant, you can outsource your coupon clipping. It’s more expensive than purchasing your coupons, as assistants of any kind are more likely to work on an hourly basis, but some really good deals might be worth it. It’s better, though, if you can find someone in your local community: just as you might hire one of the neighborhood kids to mow your lawn, you can often work out an agreement with someone to clip your coupons when they’re looking for their own.

Online Services

There are a number of websites that offer lists of coupons you can access for free and some of those sites also offer up tools for you to set alerts for products you use on a regular basis. Check out our list of 90+ coupon websites to find the tools that work for you. You can also set up your own alerts through Google Alerts and other news services for the keyword “coupon” and the product of your choice, but you’ll find yourself sorting through a lot of links you aren’t really interested in.